


he sings a love song

by citruses



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a ghost story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	he sings a love song

**Author's Note:**

> Written for broadlicnic at LJ, for my Winter Holiday Commentfic fest.

This is a ghost story.   
  
He nearly killed himself and the thought still scares him, like the sound of a lone bell tolling, like looking over cliffs and feeling the pull of the long way down in his stomach. Sometimes he wonders if he's wandering the world like a shade; he walks and the ground barely gives way beneath his feet. As if he were floating down a river with flowers in his hair; but, no, that was not his destiny. Wrong lover of the prince. Try again.  
  
The memory of Hamlet pursues him like a vengeful spirit, telling and retelling its own story, desperate to be heard again, known again. When the snow falls he remembers winters in Wittenberg and knows he can never go back, pinches out his candles and lies in dark lodging-houses trying vainly to sleep. Sometimes in the dead of night, his hands feel heavy, as if from cradling the weight of a dying friend's head. He remembers the feel of the hair between his fingers and thinks of Hamlet pressing his weight down over him like a triumph, Hamlet in bed, cursing like a pirate, Hamlet's pale thin body covering his own. Himself, below, trembling and gasping like a dying man.  
  
The pair of them used to talk for hours and now Horatio finds his voice is dying within him, drying up in his mouth, a tool rusting from lack of use. It hurts to breathe the frozen air too deeply; it cuts into the chest like a sword-wound. He had spent months in Elsinore with only his own breath for comfort; you live to tell the tale, he told himself, sighing the words out when he was alone. The good friend, the dutiful man. He left the palace as autumn lengthened to winter and his voice hardened in his throat like a dried apple-core, lodged there.  
  
One day it will be different. Years from now, one distant day, there will be a room that is a home rather than a lodging-place, and the journey will end at a doorway where the candlelight streams out honey-coloured and warm. His voice will return to him and he will laugh like a lover laughs, swear and sigh and sing and perhaps he will not be alone, for there must be someone else, to talk to. The ghosts will rise from the dark earth unquiet as ever and chatter with each other over wine and baked meats, but Horatio's mouth will be as full of words as a garden that blooms with spring flowers, and he will not hear them.


End file.
